THE COMEDY OF DEAFNESS
I have suffered hearing loss all my life; it is now getting worse for the condition is a deteriorating one. I have never felt that I suffered overly as a result of this condition, though at times I have experienced a feeling of being cut off from others as a consequence and this invariably led to a variety of compensating techniques. I have no wish to make a claim for victim status. It has been, if you’ll pardon the pun, the background noise of my life not its central feature. I dislike writing about my self and am often left feeling uncomfortable after I do however there are some experiences, issues that I can no longer duck addressing, they have become my elephant in the room and it starts to feel like dishonesty not to address them.
There are several features about hearing loss that impose themselves upon you regularly, these are:-
1) Deafness is equated with stupidity, this features regularly in sitcoms and TV drama and on a personal level I have experienced the feeling of having my IQ being silently downgraded after I have asked for a question to be repeated, sometimes more than once.
2) This leads on to the second element, that is that deafness is inherently comic, replete as they say with comic possibilities. As recently as Friday last I watched a situation comedy in which the deafness of the father was milked for its comic potential.
3) People seem to suffer short term memory loss when it comes to hearing difficulties; you inform someone that you have hearing loss, to speak up, which they do but only for five to fifteen minutes, after which they resume their normal tone. I would go into work daily, incidentally in a social care setting, with homeless people and with people experiencing mental health and drug and alcohol problems, therefore working with people who one supposes carried within themselves sensitivity to such things, but no each morning the same process of negotiating the reality of my deafness occurred.
Now as I say I have no wish to claim the status of a victim and I can, after a fashion, look after my self. However I think the phenomenon highlights an interesting and disturbing aspect that seems hard wired into the psyche respecting disability, there is distaste for it, people resent making allowances, changing their behaviour. At its most extreme disability seems to arouse a violent disgust manifested in the extraordinary instances of recorded violence committed against disabled people. When I was at school I well remember the special unit set aside for the deaf, a place to me of special terror since the threat of being sent to the unit was never wholly lifted. The children in the unit were treated as pariahs and subjected to ridicule. There were also jokes about ‘spastics,’ and a prevailing culture that held that the disabled were somehow inferior with the added inference that they somehow bore responsibility for their condition. I merely point to these things, sadly we may not be as tolerant and enlightened as we imagine.
There are several features about hearing loss that impose themselves upon you regularly, these are:-
1) Deafness is equated with stupidity, this features regularly in sitcoms and TV drama and on a personal level I have experienced the feeling of having my IQ being silently downgraded after I have asked for a question to be repeated, sometimes more than once.
2) This leads on to the second element, that is that deafness is inherently comic, replete as they say with comic possibilities. As recently as Friday last I watched a situation comedy in which the deafness of the father was milked for its comic potential.
3) People seem to suffer short term memory loss when it comes to hearing difficulties; you inform someone that you have hearing loss, to speak up, which they do but only for five to fifteen minutes, after which they resume their normal tone. I would go into work daily, incidentally in a social care setting, with homeless people and with people experiencing mental health and drug and alcohol problems, therefore working with people who one supposes carried within themselves sensitivity to such things, but no each morning the same process of negotiating the reality of my deafness occurred.
Now as I say I have no wish to claim the status of a victim and I can, after a fashion, look after my self. However I think the phenomenon highlights an interesting and disturbing aspect that seems hard wired into the psyche respecting disability, there is distaste for it, people resent making allowances, changing their behaviour. At its most extreme disability seems to arouse a violent disgust manifested in the extraordinary instances of recorded violence committed against disabled people. When I was at school I well remember the special unit set aside for the deaf, a place to me of special terror since the threat of being sent to the unit was never wholly lifted. The children in the unit were treated as pariahs and subjected to ridicule. There were also jokes about ‘spastics,’ and a prevailing culture that held that the disabled were somehow inferior with the added inference that they somehow bore responsibility for their condition. I merely point to these things, sadly we may not be as tolerant and enlightened as we imagine.
